The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  They took a corner table, slightly secluded, two handsome young men in very good suits: Billy in Armani, Sri in a sand-colored linen Billy was dying to touch. He glanced around, feeling conspicuous. To his relief the bar was full of men sitting together, colleagues and coinvestigators winding down from the day.

  Later, when they stepped into the elevator, Billy pressed the button for the fourth floor. “You’re mistaken,” Sri said softly. “I’m on five.”

  And just that easily, it was settled between them. Billy had never had to ask. Back in New York, they saw each other occasionally, then weekly, then every day. Their monogamy was spontaneous, accidental. Neither had expected it, or insisted upon it. At the outset Sri had another lover, and Billy saw an old Pearse classmate he’d slept with sporadically since college. Matthew worked for the State Department in Barcelona; once a year Billy vacationed there, and spent the better part of a week in Matthew’s bed. Since meeting Sri he’d visited Barcelona only once. Sri hadn’t pressed for details about this friend, this Matthew, but his sly smile suggested that he knew all. Once, at a dinner party, Tom and Richard had raved about their own vacation to Barcelona. Oh, Billy has intimate knowledge of Barcelona, Sri had remarked. He’s crazy about Barcelona. He can’t seem to get enough.

  But that was years ago. Now Billy couldn’t remember any skin but Srikanth’s, any mouth, any smell. I don’t want anyone else, he’d once told Sri.

  Of course you don’t, Sri replied. People irritate you. And you’re terrified of change.

  Even now, if Billy were to fall into bed with someone—a stranger from a bar or bookstore, the cute blond barista who flirted with him at Starbucks—it somehow wouldn’t matter. Sri would know instantly, and tease him mercilessly; but nothing would change between them. Billy knew this as surely as he knew his own name, and the knowledge comforted him deeply. He couldn’t imagine his life any other way.

  Different on the surface, they were alike in the ways that mattered. Both eldest sons of successful fathers (Sri’s had been a close adviser to Sanjay Gandhi); both sent away to demanding schools (Billy to Pearse, Sri to Doon). With Sri, Billy was not merely happy. He was understood. When he thought of their lives together, he felt a deep relief. Sri was his solution to a particularly nettlesome problem: how a man like him was to live.

  For years this was the phrase he used. As a teenager he viewed his sexuality as a medical condition, invisible to the naked eye, but requiring management. Watching other boys in class, on the playing field, he wondered: Is he like me? Some were, had to be. The most obvious case was a boy named Willie Neeland, who’d arrived at Pearse halfway through Billy’s second year. From his first day on campus, Willie attracted attention; with his looks, he didn’t have a choice. He was tiny, with a mop of blond curls and a comical gait. He didn’t walk across a room, he bounced. And when Willie bounced into Pearse, Billy held his breath, expecting the worst. Willie was a sight gag: his loud shirts, his tiny hands and feet, his high-pitched voice so patently ridiculous that teasing him was nearly redundant. Willie was dead meat.

  But for reasons Billy didn’t understand, Willie Neeland was spared. More than that: he was so outrageous that he became something of a celebrity. He was talented, smart in all the ways Billy wasn’t. He could draw anything, anyone, with astonishing accuracy. Most famously, he was an uncanny mimic. His face and body seemed made of plastic; he could become Mick Jagger or Richard Nixon or Muhammad Ali with a tilt of the head, a trick of voice. Soon his repertoire included every teacher at Pearse. The other boys applauded wildly, and left Willie in peace.

  At first Billy was relieved. Then, strangely, annoyed. Willie’s impersonations began to irk him. Even the name, Willie, was irritating: the girlish spelling, the phallic connotations. Most distressingly, it was far too close to Billy. They were both Williams, after all; but there the similarity ended. They were nothing alike. Billy had no interest in the Willie Neelands of the world. It was the athletes who inflamed him, his teammates in soccer and lacrosse, the bigger, tougher guys who played rugby and football. Guys who, if they suspected, would beat the shit out of him. Knowing this, he watched them furtively, shamefully, his desire inflamed by fear. (Years later he would grasp the perversity of this. But at the time, no. At the time he was inflamed.)

  He would have forgotten Willie Neeland altogether if not for a conversation that happened at the end of his third year. Like every other May, Frank McKotch drove up to Pearse to empty out Billy’s dorm room, to transport him and his junk back to Concord for the summer. They were packing boxes into the Volvo when Willie Neeland bounced past in one of his famous shirts, red gingham like a tablecloth, a sketch pad under his arm. Billy and Willie wished each other a good summer. In the Pearse way, they shook hands and shoved each other’s shoulder. When Billy got into the car, his father spoke.

  Interesting little fellow. Kind of flaky, isn’t he?

  Nah, Billy said, blushing mightily. Willie’s cool.

  (Did he imagine it, or did his father shoot him a sidelong glance? A warning look, heavy with meaning. Billy had replayed it so many times that the memory was tattered, distorted probably. It was impossible to say.)

  Then Frank launched into a story that was meant to be comic, about a time he’d driven to the beach with his buddy Neil Windsor and a couple of Radcliffe girls. Frank had taken his date into the sea grass—for a little privacy, he told Billy, with an arched eyebrow. Billy felt his cheeks heat; he was sixteen and alarmed by such confidences, which his father offered with troubling frequency. Neil didn’t lay a hand on his girl, Frank said, laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I thought for sure he was queer.

  The whole conversation lasted maybe five minutes, but Billy would remember it always. At the time—and still—he couldn’t shake the feeling that his father had been signaling him: I know what you are, and you’d better not be. Not you. Not my son.

  He couldn’t, for a long time, think of himself as gay, a term he associated with the Provincetown queens who paraded down Commercial Street every Fourth of July, that titillating and frightening and haunting spectacle of his youth. He had been a sober, sensitive boy, and this remained his basic nature. Yet his condition was associated with costumes and dancing, Mardi Gras and drag shows, the kind of contrived merriment that had always grated on him. It was a troubling discovery. Even as a child, he’d hated Halloween.

  He needed a man; he’d come to accept that. Yet he was often repulsed by men who were gay. Self-hatred, Matthew had called it, when Billy confessed it in a late-night phone call to Barcelona. Billy disputed the charge. It was in his temperament to be specific, and he knew precisely what he wanted. A serious man, a masculine man. Someone more or less like himself.

  Reaching this conclusion—his basic nature, immutable, eternal—had taken years. Before that, halfheartedly, he had tried. In college he’d fallen in love—a kind of love—with Lauren McGregor, and it was Lauren who’d made everything clear.

  He’d known her since Pearse, where she’d been his lab partner in first-year biology, the luck of alphabetical order. She was a plain, quiet girl with shaggy bangs she peered through cautiously, as though she feared what lay beyond. Tall, Billy’s height, and so thin her skirts seemed empty—no curve of hip or ass, nothing at all. Lauren was the shyest girl in the class, and the smartest; she adored Billy with an intensity so obvious that he was constantly teased about it.

  Quality, his classmates joked. That girl is quality. It was the ultimate Pearse word, in that it meant just the opposite of what it said. Failing a test was quality. Missing an easy shot was quality. A girl with shaggy hair, no tits, and no ass: that was the ultimate in quality.

  Ichabod, the boys called Lauren McGregor. Your girlfriend, Ichabod.

  At Princeton Billy forgot all about poor Lauren. Forgot about girls in general; between lacrosse and O-chem there was plenty else to fill his time. But buried beneath his busyness was a pulsating anxiety: at nineteen, at twenty, his virginity weighed on him. For that was the
way he thought of himself, despite what had transpired in his dorm room his sophomore year at Pearse, with his roommate Matthew Stone. He’d awakened one night to the sound of Matthew’s breathing, and had known immediately what his friend was doing in the next bed. Half asleep, and not knowing why, at first, Billy had done the same thing himself.

  For a long time they didn’t touch each other. They merely touched themselves in each other’s presence. They did this a lot. But because this was something Billy did anyway, with or without Matthew, he decided it didn’t count. It was only after Matthew climbed into Billy’s bed one night, after they fell asleep naked and twisted together, a warm and sticky helix of boy, that Billy spun into a panic. That spring, without telling Matthew, he entered the housing lottery with a buddy from the lacrosse team. I’m sick of you anyway, Matthew joked when he discovered this, but Billy could see the betrayal had hurt him. They remained friendly, but were not friends. They wouldn’t be friends again for a long time.

  At Pearse, and later at Princeton, girls pursued him. Pretty girls, though not the prettiest; those would have required some effort on his part. His approach was passive: he would wait, and the thing would happen. Opportunities came and went; but for one reason or another he let them pass. And the longer he waited, the more daunting the prospect became.

  The problem, he decided, was that girls he met at campus parties meant nothing to him; it wasn’t as if he actually knew them. He was too fastidious to touch a stranger, or to want to do so. Sex would have to be with someone he knew. And from sports, from school—Pearse had been nominally coed, but the students were mostly male—he knew only boys. Could he ever know a girl as completely as he’d known Matthew Stone?

  Such was his predicament his final year at Princeton—which, desperate to escape his parents, he’d chosen over the local options. This decision distressed his mother and confounded his father, who’d expected to steer him through the biology program at MIT. Billy’s uncle Roy, freakishly loyal to Harvard, was even more outraged. A few years later, at his daughters’ weddings (two for Mimi, one for Charlotte) Roy greeted Billy coolly, like a stranger he vaguely remembered instead of the nephew he’d sailed with summer after summer. Princeton? he mumbled, half in the bag at Mimi’s first wedding. It was a circuslike extravaganza at Newport to which half the alumni of Pearse had been invited—including, to Billy’s surprise, Lauren McGregor.

  He didn’t recognize her at first, so completely had she changed. Her hair was lighter, long, and teased into one of those eighties creations that would later seem embarrassing but at the time, somehow, had looked terrific. She stood at the bar with men on either side, sipping from a short glass. Her slinky dress clung to her long thighs. Until he saw it, Billy would have been unable to imagine her beautiful. The transformation was astonishing.

  He’d had a few drinks and was feeling sentimental—for his mother, sitting alone at a table tapping her foot to the music, as though wishing someone would ask her to dance; for Mimi, the romantic heroine of his childhood, who’d made him swear, at age six, that since cousins couldn’t, he would never marry. He’d agreed to this readily. If he couldn’t marry Mimi, why would he want anyone at all?

  It was in this condition that he’d first glimpsed Lauren at the bar. He touched her shoulder and was gratified by the way her face lit at the sight of him. On the dance floor she felt solid and correct in his arms, a discovery that seemed significant. He’d always been uncomfortable with the smallness of girls; but Lauren, in high heels, was exactly his height.

  Flush with gin, he flirted, a thing he had never done. That it was Lauren in his arms, not a stranger, made this possible; Lauren’s shoulder and back, her hip and ass beneath his hand. Exhilaration filled him, and with it a sense of accomplishment. It was as though he’d solved a differential equation that had once mystified him, a complex problem that had bedeviled him for years.

  The McGregors had booked a block of rooms at a hotel in Newport. Lauren, the last unmarried sister, had the room next to her parents’. Billy was mindful of this fact as he turned the key in the lock. He’d sent his own mother back to Concord with his aunt Martine, ignoring her stunned look, the reproach in her eyes. A bunch of Pearse kids are staying overnight, he told her. I’ll be home in time for breakfast.

  His mother had glanced pointedly at Lauren, who was waiting for Billy at the bar. Is she staying? his mother asked, but Billy only shrugged. He’d sensed her disapproval when he brought Lauren over to the table. For her? his mother’s eyes said. You’re leaving me for her?

  What happened in that hotel room—if you considered the whole universe of sex, the dizzying variety of acts people performed on each other’s bodies—was utterly usual; but to Billy it was rife with small discoveries. That a girl’s body, despite its odd softness, was not so different from a boy’s. Both had weight and warmth and texture, mouths that breathed and murmured and tasted. That the chain of sensations, the heat and pressure and friction, was remarkably similar. That in the end—could it really be so simple?—plain contact was the thing that mattered, skin on skin, mouth on mouth, the brief suspension of aloneness. The other heart beating in the room.

  And just that easily Lauren became his girlfriend. She phoned him nightly from her dorm room at Yale, spent every other weekend curled around him in bed. She appeared and was beautiful at his fraternity formal; she impressed his friends with her intellect and wit. At those moments Billy was weirdly proud of her, like a parent who’d watched an awkward child blossom. He remembered Lauren at fourteen—awkward Ichabod, peering at the world from behind her curtain of hair—and found himself rooting for her. It was not the way other guys loved their girlfriends, but it was a kind of love nonetheless.

  At Thanksgiving he took Lauren home to Concord. He would wonder, later, what had possessed him, but at the time it seemed a reasonable idea. Lauren’s parents had invited them both to Paris—her father ran the European branch of a company that made office equipment—but Thanksgiving break was only five days long, too brief for a trip overseas. His buddy Topher Craig spent holidays with his girlfriend’s family, so Billy assumed this was normal behavior. Having finally secured a girlfriend, he took pleasure in doing things correctly. He was proud of Lauren, of himself for loving her. And because they’d always been, he assumed his family would be proud of him too.

  His parents still tried, in those days, to spend holidays together, mainly for the benefit of Scott, who was still in high school. In retrospect, it seemed laughable. Considering how obviously Frank and Paulette hated each other, the benefits of this arrangement, to Scott or anybody, were questionable. (Were nonexistent, probably, considering the way his brother had turned out.)

  Even before Billy and Lauren arrived, the day was humming with tension. When they landed at the house Thanksgiving morning, his mother was in a fit of preparation. “Oh, there you are,” she said, barely looking up from whatever she was chopping. This was in sharp contrast to the way she usually greeted Billy, with a clingy effusiveness that made him squirm.

  “Your room is ready,” she said, like a surly innkeeper. “You can put her in the guest room.” As though Lauren were an extra cot, some out-of-season item that required storage. Billy stared at his mother in amazement. He’d seen her weep in grief or loneliness or frustration—outbursts caused, invariably, by his father. But never had the Drew manners failed her. He had never in his life seen her be rude.

  They ate dinner at midday, the Drew Thanksgiving tradition. Paulette seated Lauren at the far end of the table and never once met her eyes. Scott, uncombed and sullen, stared at Lauren hungrily; for a seventeen-year-old punk he had a surprisingly heavy beard. Gwen picked silently at her dinner. Frank, ever genial, rushed in to fill the gap, asking Lauren a million questions. He seemed delighted that she was applying to medical school. Did she plan to specialize? Had she any field in mind?

  For this Billy was truly grateful. For the first time in years, he was glad for his father’s presence. But Frank’s att
ention to Lauren only made Paulette angrier. Billy, so attuned to his mother’s emotions, noticed her deliberate chewing, the slow, deep breaths she took, as though exercising heroic patience.

  After dinner Billy suggested a walk. Normally he’d have helped clear the table, but subjecting Lauren to any more of his mother’s company seemed cruel to them both. He and Lauren bundled into scarves and sweaters; they hiked across town to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, their breath visible in the creeping dusk. I’m sorry, he said. I don’t know why she was like that.

  It’s okay, Lauren said. I didn’t mind.

  A light snow was falling as they followed the path to Author’s Ridge. Billy showed Lauren the Thoreau and Alcott plots, the two families buried twenty feet apart. He pointed to a rectangular stone no bigger than a dictionary, simply marked Henry. Small offerings decorated the grave site: a miniature pumpkin, a heap of colorful gourds.

  They hiked the path to the higher ground where, chained off from the surrounding graves, the Emerson clan was buried. The plot was studded with modest headstones. At the center, a jagged boulder marked the spot where Ralph Waldo lay.

  I love this, Lauren said, a little breathless. This is how I want to be buried, next to my husband and kids. The whole family together. Don’t you?

  I want a big rock, Billy said. Like Ralph.

  Fine, Lauren said. We’ll put you in the middle. Between me and your mother.

  Standing at Emerson’s grave, they had both laughed until they ached, the tense misery of the day evaporated. It was a moment Billy would remember for the rest of his life, himself and Lauren McGregor breathless in the snowy graveyard, laughing like fools.

  Only later did an anxious truth strike him: Lauren had imagined them married.